By Steve Wishnia

In 2008, I covered the New Hampshire primary for a small New York biweekly, traveling across the state from Manchester, a gentrifying industrial city with a 1940s-neon downtown, to the Ivy League college town of Hanover, talking to voters and going to candidates’ rallies. Driving into Claremont, a town of 13,000 on the Connecticut River, was like going back to the South Bronx of 1982. The road winding uphill from the bridge was lined with the dark, broken-brick ruins of mills and factories.

Downtown, only a handful of the 20-odd storefronts around the old opera house were occupied, most of those by candidates’ temporary offices. The one business open on a Sunday afternoon was a used-furniture shop where a liquor-breathed construction worker delivered a memorable quote about the Iraq war: “My son’s great-grandchildren will be paying for this fuckin’ war. You could give everyone health care with what they spend in two months.”

Donald Trump won two-thirds of the vote in Claremont in this year’s Republican primary Jan. 23.

In Berlin, a former paper-mill town of 9,500 in the far north, he got 63%. It was once the kind of place where you could smell the mills’ distinctively putrid odor five miles away. Paper towels were invented there in 1922 and manufactured under the Nibroc brand, but the factory closed in 2006. State and federal prisons, opened in 1999 and 2012 respectively, now provide about 500 jobs, more than the number working for the city’s government and public schools.

Trump capped his victory by carrying New Hampshire’s only cities with more than 50,000 people: 57% in Manchester, and 52% in Nashua.

In contrast, Nikki Haley did best in white-collar towns. The former South Carolina governor carried Concord, the capital, by 52%-45% over Trump, and got 60% in the gay-friendly coastal town of Portsmouth. She won 85% in Hanover; 62% in Lebanon, just to the south; 54% in Keene, another college town; and 68% in Durham, home of the University of New Hampshire.

The difference is that Haley is a traditional early-21st-century Koch Brothers Republican, her main priority policies that ensure that the rich get richer. Trump’s policies are the same, but his monosyllabic bluntness and insult-comic belligerence echo the grievances of working-class people, especially in rural areas and factories-gone towns. Unlike the unlamented wannabe Ron DeSantis, he doesn’t try to rile up bile with a barrage of bureaucratic acronyms, CRT-ESG-DEI.

Trump and Haley both have abysmal records on labor issues. Trump packed the Supreme Court with justices who ruled that it was unconstitutional for public-sector workers to have a union shop and that getting exposed to COVID on the job was not a valid occupational-safety issue. He tried to bust federal workers’ unions and filled the National Labor Relations Board with lawyers from “union avoidance” firms. His Secretary of Labor was management-side lawyer Eugene Scalia, a crusader against ergonomics-safety regulations who mocked the idea that carpal-tunnel syndrome was a real injury.

During last year’s United Auto Workers strike, Trump’s idea of showing solidarity with autoworkers was speaking at a nonunion parts plant.

Haley appointed a lawyer from a union-busting firm to run South Carolina’s labor department in 2010, while the International Association of Machinists was trying to organize the Boeing plant in North Charleston. “We’re going to fight the unions, and I needed a partner to help me do it,” she said at the time. In 2014, she told an auto-industry conference that she didn’t want union employers coming to the state “because we don’t want to taint the water.”

“My job is to make sure that I keep kicking them out,” she told the Greenville News afterwards, saying that unions were not necessary because employers take care of their “associates.”

Haley passes for a moderate because she’s not delusional. Being willfully delusional is the heart of the Trump movement, which entered national politics with his ludicrous and racist claim that Barack Obama was an illegitimate President because he was actually born in Kenya. (He argued that Obama’s Hawaiian “certificate of live birth” wasn’t an actual “birth certificate.”) Believing that Trump won the 2020 election, as a majority of Republicans seem to do, is like insisting the Atlanta Falcons won the 2017 Super Bowl because they were up 28-3 with three minutes to go in the third quarter — and if you try to tell them that Tom Brady led the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history, throwing three touchdown passes to tie the game before the New England Patriots won in overtime, they’ll spew babble about Brady’s deflated-balls scandal.

During the 2016 campaign, I wrote that “thinking Trump will really help working people is as stupid as believing that not vaccinating your kids for diphtheria will make them healthier.” That was four years before there was a mass antivaccine movement.

Trump is not a “populist.” The American Populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s was farmers fighting the economic tyranny of railroad monopolies and Eastern banks, not necessarily socialist, but speaking in the voice of the common people against what Franklin D. Roosevelt half a century later would call “economic royalists.”

Trump is a demagogue: Someone who uses a populist voice to express common bigotries and prejudices, riling up rage against “elites” and usual-suspect scapegoats instead of those with real economic power. Proletarian-sounding speech, plutocratic policies, and sadistic spirit.

There’s another word for that kind of politics, and it comes from Italy. The Fascists’ March on Rome in 1922, when they invaded the city and installed Benito Mussolini as dictator, was like what the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on Congress could have been if the mob had smarter military tactics, concentrating on taking power instead of taking selfies with their feet on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk.

It’s a deadly threat to American democracy, and if Democrats want to fight it, they need a clear program to help working people, not just platitudes about how great the economy is. The Green New Deal and Medicare for All would be good places to start.

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